Hello world

Detail of the Fra Mauro Map describing the construction of the junks that navigate in the Indian Ocean.

Migrant route to Germany

• Used at BBC - get an overview of more maps like this here

The road to Europe

Source: The independent

• Data on the conflict in Syria - UNHCR

• Analysis on Syrian Refugee Settlement Clinic Locations with R

GDP per capita

Data source: World Development Indicators

GDP in German federal states

GDP in billion Euro

Data source: Wikipedia

Polygon source: Global Administrative Areas (GADM)

More detailed - more interesting?

Social index - Proportion of social benefits recipients in Berlin

Source: Tagesspiegel

Is the necessary data available?

Source: Census Atlas

The spatial perspective…

• … is relevant to get an overview of current developments

• … is relevant to understand circumstances.

But how to get the adequate data?

• Often the necessary data is not available
• More spatial visualisations are possible with data from web 2.0. If we use Application Programming Interface (API)

A little quiz - which town is it?

A little quiz

• maps of photographic/traffic activity around the world
• data from flickr used
• guess about picture taker’s mode of transportation
• time stamps and distance traveled between a user’s pictures
  • Black is walking (less than 7mph),
  • Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph),
  • Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph);
  • Green is freeways or rapid transit.

A little quiz

Source: Eric Fischer

• The geotaggers world atlas

World Map Of Touristiness

Source: Touristiness

Based on tourist pictures uploaded on panoramio

Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

Source: The New York Times

Target / Motivation

The target is to visualize social aspects in maps.

More examples

Spatial? - Motivation

• Massive amounts of data … and growing!
• Often freely accessible on the web (e.g. through APIs)
• Often unstructured or semi-structured (e.g. web documents, news archives), often heterogeneous
• Often not intended for geographic purposes, but implicitly containing geographic info implicitly (Web 2.0)
• Often with little or no metadata

Examples

Targets

I want to….

• … show you examples of useful and less useful visualisations and applications.
• … talk about the developments of maps/geography.
• … clarify, why it is important for social sciences.
• … show you how to produce your own maps/visualisations.
• … tell you where you can find data.

Targets

Every participant should present his/her own maps.

• Presentation of toolbox (R, Google API, OpenStreetMap etc.)
• Learning by doing is very important

Personal information

University of Trier

Source: Website with city maps

Erasmus - Univerity Lyon III

Source: orangesmile

Organisation Gesis

Five departments - Survey Design and Methodology

• Monitoring Society and Social Change

• Data Archive for the Social Sciences

• Computational Social Science

• Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences

Gesis

GESIS is:

• Infrastructure Services for social sciences

• over 250 employees at three sites (Mannheim, Cologne)

GESIS offers:

• Consulting for research projects in all phases

• Research based services

Tasks GESIS-Team Statistics:

Consulting and research on …

• Planning of survey designs
• Development of sample designs for face-to-face, written, and telephone-assisted surveys
• Data analysis and visualisation

Your background?

• Where do you come from?
• What are you studying?
• What are your main research interests?

Tools and services

Why use R - It’s open source

• It’s free
• It’s open source
• …

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; it’s a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/why-use-r/

Why use R - many specific packages

A big number of (very specific) packages:

Overview of available packages on CRAN

Why use R - overview of reasons

Why use R - interfaces

• Interfaces with other programs, for example Javascript, ArcGis, GDAL and others…

Why use R - GIS

R can be used as geographic information systems (GIS)

• R and qgis

• Virgilio Gómez-Rubio - Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R

• spatstat: Spatial Point Pattern Analysis

• Task view mapping

• giswerk

Why use R - visualisation

Because it is possible to create nice graphics:

• Producing Simple Graphs with R

• Lattice

• R Graphics by Paul Murrell

• Possibilities to visualize

• ggplot2 Tutorial

• Visualizing data in R

• Interview Hadley Wickham - R-Project Data Visualization Guru

Github stack

Github page

• All relevant resources for this course will be available at:

https://github.com/Japhilko/GeoData

If you are interested in what is behind the scenes:

• Introduction to Github

How to learn R

• Manuals on the R-project webpage

• Thomas Girke - Programming in R

• Use Reference cards, plot them and have them next to your computer

• How to get help in R

I will try to keep it simple and provide lots of resources.

Basic R

Download and install R

• Click here to download R for Windows.

• R for other platforms (Linux and Mac OS) is available under:

http://mirrors.softliste.de/cran/

Rstudio

Source: R-programming